The summit - Le sommet

This morning we woke up at 6:10am and after getting ready for an hour and a half we finally jumped on our skis to reach the summit. We have to stop every hour to rest and eat because it’s getting harder and harder and the equipment we carry is heavy. 2:30 pm : we just reached a rocky area 300 meters from the summit, we are very proud we made it this far already. Ainhoa is exhausted so I decided I’ll stay with her while Flaam and Ben will be climbing to the summit.They came back 2 hours later and we all agreed that Flaam will be staying with Ainhoa while I’ll be climbing to the summit with Ben.This is amazing! The top of the mountain is a 360 degree panorama view: we can see glaciers, lakes…On our way down ( 40 meters from the summit), we noticed a yellow stain on the ground. Surprisingly we found some lichen! We took a sample of it with our ice axe so that we can bring it to Olivier who will analyze it. We didn’t expect to find any here but this is definitely the “highest lichen” of the arctic.Then, we returned to Flaam and Ainhoa , who were in a really good spirit, took our skins off and jumped back on our skis. The way down won’t be easy because the snow is unstable.We stopped at the intermediate camp , ate a soup with Brigitte and Baptiste (who just came from the base camp) then took it apart to reach the base camp by the end of the day